Experimental study on comprehensive carbon capture performance of TETA-based nanofluids with surfactants

Abstract Absorbents have become a vital factor in determining the performance of chemical absorption technique for CO 2 capture. In recent years, amine-based nanofluids have shown a promising potential to develop high-performance absorbents. Thus, a bubbling reaction system was implemented to comprehensively study the CO 2 capture properties of TETA-based nanofluids in this work. Three kinds of nanoparticles and surfactants were adopted to prepare nanofluids. The important parameters, such as ultrasonic vibration time, particle size and surfactants mass fraction, were considered to evaluate the comprehensive CO 2 capture performance. It was found that nanofluids shows better CO 2 capture performance than blank TETA solutions, which is mainly due to the enhancement of liquid-phase turbulence and the microscopic motion of nanoparticles. 1.0 h is considered as the most reasonable ultrasonic time for CO 2 absorption in this experimentation. There is an optimal SiO 2 -nanoparticle mass fraction of 0.10 wt.%, the enhancement factors of ab/desorption ( E ab and E de ) can respectively increase up to 1.29 and 1.23. The larger size can reduce the relative particle surface area and energy, 45 nm SiO 2 -nanofluids show lower energy consumption when the CO 2 -loading reaches α s . Enhancement factors of both ab/desorption for TiO 2 and SiO 2 are very close and evidently higher than Al 2 O 3 due to the nanoparticles’ different CO 2 adsorption performance. The addition of surfactant C-Na can effectively promote the mass transfer performance of nanofluids, but Triton X-100 and SDBS will cause inhibition effect when mass fraction exceeds 0.01 wt.%.